If you want to effectively drive productivity at your dealership, you need to track the right metrics. While tracking the wrong metrics can lead to false-positives and dead-ends, tracking the right metric can offer real insights into your service department productivity and bottlenecks that need fixing.
“We sell tractors. We fix them. We collect the money.”
This was the insight I received from a seasoned iron peddler upon my first visit to an equipment dealership more than 20 years ago. Simple and action-oriented, his statement summed up the fundamentals of equipment distribution.
Chris Werner, CEO of 4 entities located under the BCP Equipment Ownership Group, says giving each store and its employees the autonomy, authority and accountability to make decisions instills an entrepreneurial spirit across the organization.
Chris Werner views how the BCP Equipment Dealership Network, which includes BCP Equipment, Sunset Kubota, Valley Kubota and Cache Equipment, operates as an upside-down triangle.
Owen Palm, CEO of 21st Century Equipment, a 16-dealership John Deere network straddling Nebraska, Wyoming and Colorado borders, thought an end to the pandemic-driven extra unemployment checks would bring him some people looking for jobs.
Rapid changes create both risk and opportunity. Your dealership is impacted by big changes in technology, the workforce and higher expectations of your customers, employees and suppliers.
Dave McCarthy, southwest regional manager, aims to visit 10-15 high schools per semester to recruit high school students for local diesel tech programs and future careers at Titan Machinery.
If he could find them, Dave McCarthy, Titan Machinery’s southwest regional manager, could easily hire as many as 40 experienced service technicians for the 16 stores he oversees.
Rather than covering tuition costs up front for future technicians, the New Holland dealer reimburses new employees for school costs over the course of 3 years.
A key step to tackling the technician shortage starts with convincing high school kids that their post-secondary education does not need to be at a 4-year institution for them to be successful and make good money.
The shortage of service technicians isn’t a new problem facing the farm equipment industry — but it is a growing concern and a challenge that is getting harder to overcome.
As most of you know, our company also publishes No-Till Farmer (NTF), now in its 50th year (my dad, Frank, has personally edited each edition since 1972). With NTF’s half-century milestone and the 60th anniversary of the first commercial no-till plots in Kentucky in 2022, we’ve been preparing a museum display to bring to Louisville for the 30th National No-Tillage Conference (NNTC) in January.
It is vital to understand the changing generations of both your customers and — most importantly — your employees. Not appreciating the generational differences may lose you both customers and employees. Knowing the values, virtues and capabilities of each generation will help you retain both.
Built on 90 years of expertise, Yetter Farm Equipment leads the agriculture industry in designing effective and innovative equipment for residue management, seedbed preparation, precision fertilizer placement, harvest attachments, strip-tillage, and more.
Montag is the industry’s innovative leader for precise, accurate metering of fertilizer, seed and other nutrients. The Montag system has become the standard for deep banding of fertilizer. Montag is also pioneering the technology for cover crop seed application. The new Cover Crop+ is able to meter the smallest seed, and can be mounted to tillage implements, combines, plus Hagie sprayers and detasselers.
Finance Scope is able to provide the best financing opportunities for equipment dealers and customers through a diverse mix of lending companies under one single platform. Our large group of lenders, allows for competitive rates regardless of credit scores. Additionally, dealers and customers have access to the industry’s best expertise surrounding finance and lease structures, for all purposes, within the agricultural and construction industries. We provide all of this into one online platform to provide our customers with the best available tailored finance solution for their equipment.